Canadian Modernists: The Women of Beaver Hall & The Beaver Hall Group
  • BEAVER HALL BOOKS
  • REVIEWS
  • NEWS
  • MEMBERS
  • BLOG
  • MOMENTS
  • MORE BEAVER HALL REVIEWS
  • BEAVER HALL RESOURCES
  • BEAVER HALL SITE ARCHIVES
  • Canadian Art at Auction
  • Canadian Art & Books for Sale
  • CONTACT

Unbridled Sexuality?

3/2/2017

2 Comments

 
Picture
Unbridled Sexuality?
You might want to have a look at the nudes in The Beaver Hall Group and Its Legacy. Today it is difficult to imagine that at the time they caused such a stir. It was not only their Modernist style, but also their  “unbridled sexuality”. Several Beaver Hall artists dared to break with the academic tradition that the nude be idealized and set in a landscape to counter any sensuality or eroticism.

For years Canadian Puritanism had been lashing  out against the exhibition of nudes: newspapers revelled in the  scandals, the public  wrote letters about the immorality, and parents fretted about the corruption of their children. Hoping to deflect the attacks, some artists would place their nudes in a landscape setting. 

Nevertheless, this approach didn't usually help.  Although the Art Gallery of Toronto purchased Edwin Holgate’s Nude in the Open (1930), they soon “hid it in the basement”. 

Given the Victorian prudery, it was even more difficult for a woman painter: the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts refused to exhibit  Prudence Heward’s Girl Under a Tree  (1931), and,  although selected by a jury, the Art Gallery of Ontario refused to show Lilias Torrance Newton’s Nude in the Studio (1933)–– even more salacious because it was set indoors!
​

Edwin Holgate, Nude in the Open, 1930
2 Comments
Lawrence link
1/11/2021 04:11:00 am

Great reading your ppost

Reply
Evelyn
1/11/2021 09:01:18 am

Thanks, Lawrence!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Archives:

    November 2018
    March 2017
    January 2016
    October 2005

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.